In today's computing environments, system performance is increasing as costs are decreasing. High performance computing systems are now available to and used by many more entities, including enterprises and small businesses. As these high performance systems enter the smaller, higher volume markets, cost pressures become more critical. There is an increasing need for high performance, low cost storage systems for use in these environments.
The high performance storage systems of today have very complicated initialization procedures. For example, a high performance storage system may include many storage arrays. Each array may include multiple storage processing units. In order to initialize the storage system for operation in the computing environment, an individual must plug a serial cable into a serial port on one storage processing unit in one array. A remote access server (RAS) connection must then be established to the array, and then a Point-to-Point (PPP) stack must be built. The initialization parameters for the storage processing unit are then entered. The serial cable is then unplugged and plugged into the next storage processing unit in the array, and the process repeated. This process is repeated for every single storage processing unit in every array in the storage system. The initialization process takes many hours and is much too complex to be performed by the customer. Rather, it is performed by a service engineer. The slow and complicated initialization process adds significant overall cost to the storage system. It would be highly desirable to provide a storage system initialization method that would reduce initialization time and complexity and thus reduce the cost of storage systems.